Miroslav Bogdanovic

Manuel Wüthrich, Felix Widmaier, Felix Grimminger et al.

Dexterous object manipulation remains an open problem in robotics, despite the rapid progress in machine learning during the past decade. We argue that a hindrance is the high cost of experimentation on real systems, in terms of both time and money. We address this problem by proposing an open-source robotic platform which can safely operate without human supervision. The hardware is inexpensive (about \SI{5000}[\$]{}) yet highly dynamic, robust, and capable of complex interaction with external objects. The software operates at 1-kilohertz and performs safety checks to prevent the hardware from breaking. The easy-to-use front-end (in C++ and Python) is suitable for real-time control as well as deep reinforcement learning. In addition, the software framework is largely robot-agnostic and can hence be used independently of the hardware proposed herein. Finally, we illustrate the potential of the proposed platform through a number of experiments, including real-time optimal control, deep reinforcement learning from scratch, throwing, and writing.

Kourosh Darvish, Marta Skreta, Yuchi Zhao et al. · gatech, nvidia

Chemistry experiments can be resource- and labor-intensive, often requiring manual tasks like polishing electrodes in electrochemistry. Traditional lab automation infrastructure faces challenges adapting to new experiments. To address this, we introduce ORGANA, an assistive robotic system that automates diverse chemistry experiments using decision-making and perception tools. It makes decisions with chemists in the loop to control robots and lab devices. ORGANA interacts with chemists using Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive experiment goals, handle disambiguation, and provide experiment logs. ORGANA plans and executes complex tasks with visual feedback, while supporting scheduling and parallel task execution. We demonstrate ORGANA's capabilities in solubility, pH measurement, recrystallization, and electrochemistry experiments. In electrochemistry, it executes a 19-step plan in parallel to characterize quinone derivatives for flow batteries. Our user study shows ORGANA reduces frustration and physical demand by over 50%, with users saving an average of 80.3% of their time when using it.

Yuchi Zhao, Miroslav Bogdanovic, Chengyuan Luo et al.

Object placement in robotic tasks is inherently challenging due to the diversity of object geometries and placement configurations. To address this, we propose AnyPlace, a two-stage method trained entirely on synthetic data, capable of predicting a wide range of feasible placement poses for real-world tasks. Our key insight is that by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify rough placement locations, we focus only on the relevant regions for local placement, which enables us to train the low-level placement-pose-prediction model to capture diverse placements efficiently. For training, we generate a fully synthetic dataset of randomly generated objects in different placement configurations (insertion, stacking, hanging) and train local placement-prediction models. We conduct extensive evaluations in simulation, demonstrating that our method outperforms baselines in terms of success rate, coverage of possible placement modes, and precision. In real-world experiments, we show how our approach directly transfers models trained purely on synthetic data to the real world, where it successfully performs placements in scenarios where other models struggle -- such as with varying object geometries, diverse placement modes, and achieving high precision for fine placement. More at: https://any-place.github.io.

Walker Byrnes, Miroslav Bogdanovic, Avi Balakirsky et al.

Intelligent and reliable task planning is a core capability for generalized robotics, requiring a descriptive domain representation that sufficiently models all object and state information for the scene. We present CLIMB, a continual learning framework for robot task planning that leverages foundation models and execution feedback to guide domain model construction. CLIMB can build a model from a natural language description, learn non-obvious predicates while solving tasks, and store that information for future problems. We demonstrate the ability of CLIMB to improve performance in common planning environments compared to baseline methods. We also develop the BlocksWorld++ domain, a simulated environment with an easily usable real counterpart, together with a curriculum of tasks with progressing difficulty for evaluating continual learning. Additional details and demonstrations for this system can be found at https://plan-with-climb.github.io/ .

Miroslav Bogdanovic, Majid Khadiv, Ludovic Righetti

We present a general, two-stage reinforcement learning approach to create robust policies that can be deployed on real robots without any additional training using a single demonstration generated by trajectory optimization. The demonstration is used in the first stage as a starting point to facilitate initial exploration. In the second stage, the relevant task reward is optimized directly and a policy robust to environment uncertainties is computed. We demonstrate and examine in detail the performance and robustness of our approach on highly dynamic hopping and bounding tasks on a quadruped robot.

Miroslav Bogdanovic, Ludovic Righetti

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In this paper we present a novel approach for efficient exploration that leverages previously learned tasks. We exploit the fact that the same system is used across many tasks and build a generative model for exploration based on data from previously solved tasks to improve learning new tasks. The approach also enables continuous learning of improved exploration strategies as novel tasks are learned. Extensive simulations on a robot manipulator performing a variety of motion and contact interaction tasks demonstrate the capabilities of the approach. In particular, our experiments suggest that the exploration strategy can more than double learning speed, especially when rewards are sparse. Moreover, the algorithm is robust to task variations and parameter tuning, making it beneficial for complex robotic problems.

Miroslav Bogdanovic, Majid Khadiv, Ludovic Righetti

Reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great success in solving different problems ranging from playing video games to robotics. However, they struggle to solve delicate robotic problems, especially those involving contact interactions. Though in principle a policy directly outputting joint torques should be able to learn to perform these tasks, in practice we see that it has difficulty to robustly solve the problem without any given structure in the action space. In this paper, we investigate how the choice of action space can give robust performance in presence of contact uncertainties. We propose learning a policy giving as output impedance and desired position in joint space and compare the performance of that approach to torque and position control under different contact uncertainties. Furthermore, we propose an additional reward term designed to regularize these variable impedance control policies, giving them interpretability and facilitating their transfer to real systems. We present extensive experiments in simulation of both floating and fixed-base systems in tasks involving contact uncertainties, as well as results for running the learned policies on a real system.

Hamza Merzic, Miroslav Bogdanovic, Daniel Kappler et al.

Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it is crucial that it continuously takes sensor feedback into account. While visual feedback is important for inferring a grasp pose and reaching for an object, contact feedback offers valuable information during manipulation and grasp acquisition. In this paper, we use model-free deep reinforcement learning to synthesize control policies that exploit contact sensing to generate robust grasping under uncertainty. We demonstrate our approach on a multi-fingered hand that exhibits more complex finger coordination than the commonly used two-fingered grippers. We conduct extensive experiments in order to assess the performance of the learned policies, with and without contact sensing. While it is possible to learn grasping policies without contact sensing, our results suggest that contact feedback allows for a significant improvement of grasping robustness under object pose uncertainty and for objects with a complex shape.